Writer: Katherine Stockton
Director: Steven Bowyer
What happens to The History Boys when they go to university? Alan Bennett may leave us to guess what Irwin’s class made of those hard-won Oxbridge places, but Katherine Stockton’s original drama Colloquium offers up a possible scenario with her own set of characters. Showing at the Hens and Chickens Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe, Stockton’s play looks at the process of elite university interviews, the intellectualisation of knowledge, its acquisition and how it can be creatively applied.
Preparing for the latest round of entrance interviews at their Oxford College, English literature professor Alfred Newman and younger, more radical, History department colleague Bennet Burton are at odds about how to test the candidates’ mettle. With retirement approaching for Alfred, his legacy is also up for grabs when potential student Alice refuses to accept the rules set by either.
Colloquium is not a play with a plot as such, more a collection of musings on the problems facing higher education, the philosophy of learning and teaching, and the principles of originality in the construction of knowledge. Stockton’s play is rather an essay in dramatic form. Drawing obviously on the discursive nature of Bennett’s play, the writer adopts a similar concept in using disruptive educator figures to push students into thinking more broadly about the concepts they espouse and the construction of argument. There are subtle allusions also to the Inside No 9 episode The Riddle of the Sphinx that is likewise set in a don’s office where a female student takes on an established male academic who vastly underestimates her.
It is an engaging 60-minutes with plenty of meaty debate to chew over, yet the show lacks narrative drive, so although various scenarios are established, they are left unresolved or in the case of the central Newman-Burton-Alice encounter, strangely without consequence. Character development is partly the problem; what do any of them learn in the course of their encounters that make them better, more rounded people and why is Alice so emotional at the end? Is Stockton saying that ivory tower universities are largely incapable of free thought and that lecturers have much to learn from their students or that too few applicants have the capacity to engage in broader debates about the subjects they claim to love?
Burton is initially seen as the moderniser, someone who wants to tear down the establishment and defy rules set by the Office for Students in a quest for intellectual challenge. Yet, later in the play issues with excess anger including berating his colleague and throwing a chair around suggest he’s not the inspirational teacher that Irwin was for Bennett’s boys, but Stockton doesn’t address this wildly unacceptable trait.
Similarly, current student George and tutor Anna give extended monologues to the audience that delve into their perspective. George talks about different kinds of knowledge using a pub quiz anecdote to argue the difference between certified and general learning, while Anna talks about a Spencer painting that she sees in the Tate. These could be picked out as interesting but semi-separate examples for a highlight box in an essay, but what either perspective is contributing to the overall narrative is less clear.
Colloquium is an interesting piece, but it feels like there’s a longer, more integrated play trying to get out.
Runs until 4 August 2022
The Camden Fringe runs from 1-28 August 2022
